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Alfred Hitchcock’s use of reverse zoom that produces the effect of vertigo as Scottie fails to save Madeleine from jumping off the tower. Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, US, 1958). Courtesy British Film Institute

Fifty years after its initial release, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (US, 1958) remains one of the most celebrated films of all time. But because of its complexity, its dark romanticism, its challenging of filmic conventions, genres, and narrative time, Vertigo’s impact on the history of filmmaking is more ambiguous than that of Psycho (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, US, 1960), Dial M for Murder (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, US, 1954), and North by Northwest (dir. Alfred Hitch- cock, US, 1959) — all of which have generated a number of filmic remakes and parodies.1 Vertigo’s complicated narrative structure, its psychological twists, and its discontinuous treatment of time, space, and perspective make it difficult to recreate.

A very different picture emerges when we look at the place of Vertigo in film theory, where it has played a role unmatched by any other film. It has inspired theories of auteurship (Chabrol and Rohmer, Rothman), feminist film theory (Mulvey, de Lauretis, Kof- man), cinematic formalism (Hitchcock, Spoto, Wood), the rethink- ing of the relationship of memory to time (Marker, Esquenazi), and the treatment of cinema as a form of tourism (Auiler, Kraft and Leventhal).2 It has been taken to exemplify Jacques Lacan’s “Real”

Vertigo and the Vertiginous

History of Film Theory

Kriss Ravetto- Biagioli

Camera Obscura 75, Volume 25, Number 3

doi 10.1215/02705346-2010-011 © 2011 by Camera Obscura

Published by Duke University Press

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(Modleski, Žižek) and to mark a point of fundamental crisis in narrative cinema (Deleuze, Rancière, Orr).3 By now, Vertigo is so deeply embedded in film theory (and vice versa) that it is almost impossible to read it without referencing the cinematic lexicon of scopophilia, fetishism, voyeurism, the sadistic male gaze, the objec- tification of the female body, mental images, relational images, the imaginary Real, the symbolic Real, and the “real Real.”

What attracts so many filmmakers and critics to make Vertigo into an image, a fetish, a metafilm, the ground on which theories of identification, subjectivity, the male gaze, gender rela- tions, or narrative crisis are constructed? The range of conflicting interpretations that Vertigo invites, I argue, is an indication of its ability to resist any particular reading. As Gilles Deleuze points out, the function of the “ground” allows for participation with or “in” the film in the form of founding a particular claim — about the art of time, gender relations, identification with characters and situations, the subjective point of view, and the political economy of desire.4 The ground marks the designation of an idea distinct from the film on which it is itself grounded — even if that reading is that Vertigo symbolizes the lack of relations between the sexes, the failure of desire, or the abyss of the Real (that is, the ground of negation). If all the competing interpretations of Vertigo have proved one thing, it is that Vertigo is not reproducible (as a film or as a theory), since it does not designate any localizable relations but ceaselessly produces relations that are themselves ungrounding.

My argument is not that Vertigo is a metafilm (a film about all film); instead, I see it as potentially many films about many of the issues attributed to it, but one that does not simply repre- sent theoretical and philosophical points. It is a film that both transforms with new theoretical readings or filmic offshoots and questions these readings by offering other possible relations and critical reflections. Vertigo swallows up the ground — the ability to distinguish the original or the real from the derived — that allows critical readings to function. Rather than evaluate which particular interpretation is better grounded than the others, I want to show how competing readings of Vertigo end up ungrounding the very theoretical apparatuses they rely on — from psychoanalytic read-

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ings of gender politics that question the status of the “Real” to deconstructive or nonsubject- based film theories that use Vertigo to posit a crisis in narrative cinema and representation in general.

I start by analyzing how Vertigo inspired semiotic and psy- choanalytic theories of the pleasure of the male gaze that controls and constitutes woman (Madeleine) as an object to be looked at — a fetish. Theories like Christian Metz’s and Raymond Bellour’s rely on the audience’s identification with the obsessive desire of the male protagonist (Scottie) to possess the idealized woman object. Such theories gave rise to Laura Mulvey’s and Sarah Kofman’s feminist critiques of the male gaze. Feminist readings of Vertigo, in turn, have led to debates over the sexual identity of the subject (Modleski, Samuels),5 as well as readings that question the onto- logical status of both the subject and the subject of the gaze. They see Vertigo as defying the logic of identification and its symbolic order (Žižek, Esquenazi, Pisters, Deleuze),6 focusing instead on centripetal forces, forces of disjuncture and intensity (Gordon, Marker, Godard).7 Such readings of Vertigo, however, diverge. On the one hand, Slavoj Žižek uses Vertigo to demonstrate how reality is the “impossible Thing- in- itself . . . open[ing] the way to the celebra- tion of failure” — that is, failure that grounds us in a nonreciprocal relationship with the real.8 On the other hand, Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue that with Vertigo, Hitchcock “introduces the mental image into cinema . . . a figure of thought,” that is, Vertigo produces critical thinking that operates like a rhizome — by variation, expan- sion, conquest, capture, offshoots.9

Together with his critical reflections on cinema, Hitchcock’s oeuvre offers a different ontological reading relating sensation to affect. By the early 1960s, he presented Psycho and Vertigo as exam- ples of pure cinema — a formal cinema engendered by montage. In contrast to what he called “photographs of people talking,” Hitch- cock defined montage as the craft of assembling images.10 At the same time, he also argued that cinema could have a transformative emotional impact on audiences.11 What makes Vertigo so attractive to film critics is that it provides a metacinematic commentary on the medium of film itself. It is its self- reflexive commentary that allows so many critics to treat Vertigo as representative of film in gen-

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eral. The history of the criticism of Vertigo thus reveals the implicit ideological trends, twists, and transformations embedded in criti- cism, making the rereading of Vertigo vertiginous itself.

Vertigo is unique in Hitchcock’s oeuvre. Unlike in his previ- ous films, there is no restitution for the crimes committed: Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) gets away with murdering his wife, Mad- eleine (Kim Novak); Scottie ( James Stewart) gets away with making Judy (Kim Novak) over into Madeleine. First the film gets away with forcing us to believe that Judy is Madeleine, and that Madeleine is possessed by the spirit of her great- grandmother (Carlotta Valdes). Once Elster gets away with murder, this romantic vision is turned into a perverse obsession with cinema’s own simulations. Often in Hitchcock’s films, the relationship between the wrongly accused or the innocent and the criminal is blurred, implicating the innocent in the crime — a prime example is Strangers on a Train (US, 1951), in which Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) offers with Guy Haines (Farley Granger) to swap murders and then murders Haines’s wife without any agreement, leaving Haines unjustly accused. Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Deleuze all claim that Hitchcock’s films present crime as a form of gift exchange.12 Within a Maussian economy, the gift can also be seen as an act of aggression, estab- lishing a “monstrous relation” that can only be severed with heavy consequences.13 In Vertigo the gift of the fake but idealized Mad- eleine is given to Scottie in exchange for Elster’s getting away with the murder of the real Madeleine.14 It is, however, hard to tell who is innocent, since we are allowed to empathize with both Scottie and Judy, who are equally implicated in the events that transpire — Madeleine’s murder, Scottie’s madness, and Judy’s death. But, unlike in Strangers on a Train or The Wrong Man (dir. Hitchcock, US, 1956), in Vertigo there is no final judgment, vindication, or sense of closure. The film simply returns to the destabilizing image of vertigo.

Critical readings of Vertigo exhibit a similar uncertainty when judging the film’s placement of the cinematic gaze. The film has been read by both feminist and psychoanalytic film theories as misogynist — shaping the sadistic male gaze that controls the object- woman, reducing her to a fetish. Feminists and queer theo-

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rists have read it as a film about the feminine or bisexual nature of Scottie’s identification with Madeleine (or the ghost of Carlotta).15 Alternatively, psychoanalytic theory posits that Vertigo presents an impossible masculinity, leaving the position of power (of the gaze) to what Jean- Pierre Oudart called l’absent — the absent one, some- thing akin to the Lacanian outside or Real.16 Other readings liken the gaze to a controlled vision contrived by Elster (as a stand- in for Hitchcock): “Nothing in Vertigo compels us to view the narrative through ‘Scottie’s’ eyes — on the contrary, the text could be gener- ated in the first half through Judy’s knowing performance as Mad- eleine for ‘Scottie,’ according to Gavin’s script.”17 But both the gaze and the spectator’s alleged identification with it are contingent on figures of the past and objects of desire that never existed. How is it, then, that we can erect theories of the Real on the powers of the false without revising what we mean by the Real (that is, transform- ing the Real into the Baudrillardian hyperreal, the copy with no model, or the Real without any reference to reality)?

The inability to localize the subject of the cinematic gaze destabilizes subjects and their relations of power. Any identifica- tion with Scottie as the master of the romantic gaze, the specta- tor who watches and falls in love with Madeleine, slips over into a voyeuristic absorption in the spectacular performance of Judy as Madeleine and in the gaze that detaches itself and even reproaches Scottie for what William Rothman calls his “murderous gaze.”18 The shift between being captivated by the image of Madeleine and being captive of Scottie’s obsessive gaze forces us to see the relation of seduction to obsession, blurring the line between possessing and being possessed by the gaze. But it is when this ambiguous position (or possession) confronts the uncertainty or apparent falsity of what we have been (and are being) shown that the gaze returns to us in the figure of a spiral. For example, the romantic narrative turns into a facade for murder ( Judy’s performance as Madeleine is a decoy to distract Scottie and allow Elster to kill his wife), murder turns into madness (Scottie is driven mad with guilt over Madeleine’s alleged suicide, which is really a murder), and madness turns into obsession (Scottie emerges from the asylum only to return to the fake Madeleine’s old haunts in search of a

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real ghost). Furthermore, guilt turns into romance ( Judy turns her being an accomplice to Madeleine’s murder into her desire to make Scottie love her for who she really is), and romance into a perverse repetition (Scottie forces Judy to become Madeleine once again), which turns into murderous rage (Scottie’s anger after he realizes he was tricked by both Elster and Judy). All these twists and turns return us to the figure of vertigo that appears in a nonhuman graphic form in the opening credits and reappears throughout the film — in Madeleine’s hair, in Scottie’s pursuit of Madeleine through the streets of San Francisco, in the animated image of his nightmare, and in the camera’s simulation of his acrophobia (the famous reverse zoom).

And while Vertigo installs the perspective from which the film is shot in various figures of vertigo, it also questions our per- ception and ability to distinguish the boundaries of narrative time from memory and fantasy. Vertigo collapses time, memory, and fantasy into indistinguishable categories, making us pon- der whether Vertigo is only the product of imagination. As Robin Wood, James Maxfield, and Charles Barr suggest, the film could be a dream or fantasy from the perspective of Scottie, who hangs from the rooftop in the opening sequence; or, as Chris Marker has interpreted it, it could be Scottie’s nightmare that leads him into madness — beginning with Scottie at and returning Scottie to the asylum.19 Yet such readings attempt to ground the film’s point of view with Scottie’s (in his fear or in his madness), rather than see time as an image that also spirals out of control.

Repetition Compulsion

Already in 1960 Jean Douchet provided a psychoanalytic reading of Hitchcock, arguing that by presenting the character’s subjective point of view, his films created a cinema conscious of itself as a voy- euristic pleasure, providing the audience with an object of desire in the figure of woman.20 In Vertigo we are originally offered the subjective perspective of John (Scottie) Ferguson — the police inspector who in the opening sequence watches a rank- and- file police officer fall to his death as he is trying to save him. Having

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developed (or realizing he has) vertigo as a result of this traumatic experience, Scottie quits the force but is soon approached by an “old college chum,” Gavin Elster, who wants him to follow his wife (Madeleine). Elster does not believe she is having an affair, but rather that she is possessed by the ghost of her great- grandmother, Carlotta Valdes — the mistress of an Old San Francisco tycoon who committed suicide after he took custody of their child and discarded her. The “hardheaded Scottie” reluctantly accepts the job only after seeing the beautiful Madeleine and only to fall in love with her fantastic romantic story after rescuing her when she jumps into San Francisco Bay.

Unlike Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), Scottie’s motherly friend and onetime fiancée, Madeleine appears remote, mysteri- ous, and even ghostly. She inexplicably appears and disappears from the window of Carlotta’s old house without the proprietor noticing that she has even arrived, and she later seems to vanish as Scottie follows her in a forest of sequoia trees. In these subjec- tive point- of- view tracking shots, it is Scottie who loses sight of Madeleine, and because we watch Scottie watching Madeleine, we also become increasingly obsessed with her beautifully elusive and possessed character. Madeleine is introduced through a series of camera movements: the first is a smooth pan that shifts into a dolly

Madeleine standing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge before she jumps, only to be rescued by Scottie. Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, US, 1958). Courtesy British Film Institute

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shot, moving from a close- up of Scottie (who looks off to his right), but it suddenly becomes a free indirect subjective point- of- view shot that slowly moves through the main dining room of Ernie’s Restaurant, lingering on the image of Madeleine, only to be fur- ther enhanced by Bernard Herman’s hauntingly romantic musical score. The free indirect subjective point- of- view shot reveals more the romantic gaze than any possible subjective point of view, thus commenting on what Scottie feels rather than what he sees. The camera’s pan stops to reveal the main dining room and then dollies toward Madeleine, focusing on her back as she sits at a table with Elster. The next shot is an abrupt cut from Scottie’s perspective, a medium shot that frames the couple as they sit, get up, and walk into the foreground. The third is a static, expressionless close- up of Madeleine’s profile. As Scottie’s head is turned away from Mad- eleine, the shot does not reflect his actual perspective, but we get the sense that he must feel her presence since these images are all accompanied by Herman’s romantic musical theme.21 Madeleine is, therefore, installed in what seems to be Scottie’s (and our) romantic dream — a position emphasized by the fact that she is often shot with a fog filter. Yet for psychoanalytic film theory she is not just placed in the role of the eternal mysterious feminine; she also expresses the “death wish” elaborated by Sigmund Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.22

The infamous profile of Madeleine at Ernie’s Restaurant that Scottie feels rather than sees. Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, US, 1958). Courtesy British Film Institute

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Wood, for instance, argues that Madeleine is “continually associated with death.”23 She leads Scottie and the camera into the portals of the past, the graveyard of Mission Dolores, the Legion of Honor (where we find the portrait of Carlotta Valdes), Carlotta’s old house, “old Fort Point,” and the Mission San Juan Bautista (the site of her apparent death). Rather than just a seductive image of fascination or desire, for Wood, “Madeleine represents a wish- fulfillment on a deeper and more valid level . . . she has evoked in us all that longing for something beyond daily reality [death] which is so basic to human nature” (85). But the film’s fascination with the portals of the past also points to something beyond “human nature” — beyond Madeleine’s personal connection to these haunt- ing locations. It points to these locations as simple tourist sites. Thus we as spectators (even native San Franciscans) are turned into tourists twice removed. Here the line dividing cinematic escap- ism and the tourist’s experience of place is called into question. These iconic images of “old San Francisco,” however, do not evoke the same feeling in all spectators. For Madeleine, they serve as a metaphor for the death drive, but to Elster they represent man’s lost “power and freedom.” For the tourist they are nonplaces mediated by a preconceived image of consuming experience rather than an actual connection to place, while the cinephile, who makes the pilgrimage to the Vertigo locations, sees them as an opportunity to recover the “lost spiral of time” (even the one that never hap- pened).24 Finally, for the spectator of the film these locations are somehow all of these things. The indexical images of Mission Dolo- res, the Legion of Honor, the Palace of Fine Arts, and Fort Point are not stable, not even for those cinephilic tourists like Barr and Douglas Cunningham, who end up looking for the ghosts of a film about impersonating ghosts and dreams of power.

In a film that presents so many different possible desires, Wood singles out Scottie’s for Madeleine, but he argues that it is not just a simple desire to cure her from her illusions so as to possess her. It is also a desire of identification. Scottie wants to become Madeleine — to die in her place, as he does in his nightmare ver- sion of her recurring dream of walking down what used to be a mirrored hallway and ending up in her grave. Even so, like Scottie,

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we are shocked by her death midway through the film because it shatters both Scottie’s death wish by proxy (a possible tragic end- ing) and the romantic fantasy (a happy ending), thus leaving the audience wondering where the film will go. We have no idea how much time has passed between Madeleine’s death, Scottie’s sneak- ing away from the scene of the crime, the inquest into Madeleine’s death, Scottie’s nightmare, and his ending up in a sanitarium.

Like Scottie, we are lost in the disintegration of the images actualized in his nightmare, and we are, therefore, unable to identify with Scottie, whose vertigo is now exaggerated and caricatured by the use of animation. While Wood argues that it is Judy’s memory of the false suicide/real murder of Madeleine that stabilizes our per- spective, at the expense of our identification with Scottie, Jacques Rancière argues that the “visual clumsiness of the outdated device of voice- off [voice- over] narration” reminds us that this is fiction.25 For both Wood and Rancière, the audience cannot identify with Madeleine/Judy. Instead, we take a critical distance from Scottie’s obsessive voyeurism because we know what he does not: that Judy is Madeleine or Madeleine is Judy (an imposter), but also that Judy loves Scottie. The ideal object of fascination is a fraud, but the real Judy is in love with Scottie. We learn that Judy and Elster tricked Scottie into believing that Judy was Madeleine (Elster’s wife), that Madeleine/Judy was suffering from an obsessive identification with the ghost of Carlotta, and that Madeleine/Judy was driven to sui- cide when in fact Elster killed his real wife and used Scottie (who, suffering from vertigo, could not look down from the bell tower to see that the woman falling down was not Madeleine) as a witness to a false suicide.

While we are cured of our vertigo, Scottie remains dis- traught by the death of Madeleine and suffers from “acute mel- ancholia.” He obsessively identifies with the dead Madeleine by appropriating her dreams of death and fantasizing that he dies in her place (falling from the tower onto the roof of the mission). Yet when he sees Judy on the streets of San Francisco, he does not recognize that Judy and Madeleine are the same person. Instead, he obsessively attempts to turn Judy into Madeleine — forcing her to change her appearance, her clothes, and her hair color. When

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she dons Carlotta’s (Madeleine’s) necklace, Scottie acknowledges that she is Madeleine and that Madeleine is a fraud. As Virginia Wexman notes, “Unlike the clothes Scottie buys Judy, this necklace cannot be duplicated. Its status as a symbol of family jewels implies the inherited wealth that marks a truly upper- class person: an aris- tocrat.”26 It is the displacement of the necklace of the upper- class Madeleine onto the working- class Judy that reveals that Madeleine was always only an imaginary construct.

As the audience, however, we are not sure if Scottie knows the truth or if the necklace has only retriggered his hysteria over the death of Madeleine. It is only when Scottie forces Judy to be Madeleine in a reenactment of Madeleine’s death that it becomes clear that he knows. But, even then, his constant slippage between addressing Judy as Madeleine and talking about Madeleine in the third person makes us doubt his understanding and his san- ity. As Wood suggests, Scottie does understand that this reenact- ment will help to cure him of both his perverse obsession and his vertigo — the condition that prevented him from saving Madeleine from jumping from the tower in the first place.27 This cure, how- ever, comes with a double loss: he loses both the real Judy, who falls or jumps to her death from the same tower as Madeleine, and the ideal object of desire (Madeleine), since it is revealed that the latter is an imposter. In the process, we also realize that not only is Madeleine a fraud, but so is Scottie’s vision of Madeleine. Just as we have been seduced by Madeleine’s feigned possession, we have been led astray by Scottie’s obsession to possess Madeleine.

Following Christian Metz’s argument that cinema presents a presymbolic (pre- Oedipal) imaginary, Raymond Bellour claimed that all Hollywood narratives follow a male Oedipal trajectory — that they represent castration. For Bellour, Hitchcock’s films demonstrate this securing of male identity through the staging of woman as spectacle.28 In this reading, Scottie’s identification with the beautiful but suicidal Madeleine substitutes for his fascination and fear of death inscribed in his vertigo. It is only the psychologi- cal interpretation of the film that can make sense of what seems to be a series of narrative implausibilities: only if Scottie elevates Madeleine to the level of the Woman — a fetish object that blocks

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or displaces his phobia — can we believe that the veteran detective is so blind (and able to blind us) to the hoax that Judy is Madeleine, that Madeleine is possessed by a ghost, and that this idealized (ghostly) Madeleine dies instead of Elster’s real wife Madeleine. Only then can Scottie replace the real Madeleine as the victim of the film. This reading can only be sanctioned by installing Vertigo in a narrative in which Scottie is equated with the eternal feminine (the Other, the victim par excellence).

Even so, as Susan White points out, theories of identifica- tion with the eternal feminine always assume that “somewhere the real woman, a victim, is speaking.”29 Vertigo challenges this notion of the real woman as an abstract form and points to the paradoxi- cal connection of the victim (whom we identify with) to the process of identification. The real Madeleine, who Elster kills and then throws from the church tower, cannot be considered the victim of the film, since we (as spectators) cannot identify with her. She is discarded by Elster, Judy, Scottie, and the film itself. Instead, it is the enthralled image of Madeleine that stands in for the victim. But the film undermines this image, and it shows that the victim is an imposter. While the film rejects readings that identify all victims by simple analogies of some greater symbolic victim (the eternal feminine, the Other), it still continues to produce victims. Mad- eleine is a victim (killed for her money), Judy identifies Scottie as the victim of her and Elster’s deception, and Scottie identifies Judy as the victim of Elster’s deception (Elster, in fact, ditches her when he gets the money).

The designation of the victim, much like the enthralled image of Madeleine that instantiates the process of seduction, takes place at the “mixed up space of non- fictional pretending.”30 Vertigo is neither simply a fiction nor is it a symbolic fact (it represents all sexual relations). It produces certain tensions that, as Janet Har- bord explains, “hover in a zone of undecidability between fact and fiction, the real and the imaginary, the living and the dead.” When we watch the other (the character or the actress) in a moment of privacy, “we are caught between a presence that is nonetheless in the past, an intimacy that is also addressed to a collective audience, and there is also a sense of an actress years ago, addressing herself to a future audience, [one] that she will never know” (44 – 45).31

<fig. 2 cap.>Streets of London, Children of Men (2006)

<fig. 3 cap.>Simulacrum of Pink Floyd’s album cover Animals, Children of Men (2006)

<fig. 4 cap.>Michelangelo’s David, Children of Men (2006)

<fig. 5 cap.>Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, Children of Men (2006)

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From Symbol to Symptom: From Phobia to Fetish

In an attempt to free the fake Madeleine from her feigned obses- sion with the dead (great- grand- ) mother, Scottie unwittingly helps advance the staging of the murder by bringing the fake Mad- eleine to the mission, where she and Elster stage the fake suicide (and the cover- up for the real murder). According to Metz’s logic, Scottie’s tragedy, like Oedipus’s, is not his loss of Madeleine (or Judy) as his erotic obsession, but his loss of what Madeleine stands for: the desire for and identification with the mother.32 This iden- tification is an attempt to circumvent castration, but it is coupled with the guilty pleasure of incest. Scottie’s cure is to accept that he is castrated (or that he is forever barred from possessing the ideal Madeleine/mother). It then follows that Madeleine (the ideal woman) does not exist: she is nothing but the symptom of Scottie. Once she is rejected or, in Scottie’s words, “ditched” by Scottie, the void of her nonexistence is unmasked. In other words, once Scottie is cured of his vertigo and of his guilt for desiring the cosmic mother, she has no reason to exist (or insist). Hence, she is reduced to a form of representation that not only unveils the female body as the spectacle of castration but also as a site of radi- cal lack (the abyss) that Scottie tries to cover up with fetishes (the clothes, the hair, the power of fascination itself, and of course, the femme fatale). Like all femmes fatales, Madeleine is a pure illu- sion diverting our attention away from the fact that there is noth- ing there to see. There is no real phallic signifier, only vertigo.

It was Laura Mulvey who, in 1975, challenged readings that normalized both man’s control of the gaze and the staging of woman as man’s fetish object (a phallic substitute) designed to mitigate man’s fears of castration or death. She aspired to use psychoanalysis as a weapon to expose man’s anxiety of castration and the two processes by which man mitigated such anxieties: (1) a voyeurism linked to sadism wherein the subject (man) finds plea- sure in ascertaining guilt and subjecting the guilty (woman) to punishment; and (2) a “fetishistic scopophilia,” wherein the subject disavows the threat of castration by substituting the phallus with the fetish (woman).33 Mulvey uses Vertigo to argue that the relega- tion of Madeleine to a fetishistic sublime object of desire reinforces the misogyny and sadism of the cinematic gaze.

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Scottie (and the audience through him) is given the power to subject Madeleine to his sadistic will. She becomes the object of the voyeuristic gaze and a fetish standing in for his fatalistic com- pulsions. As a policeman and a man of means, Scottie is a perfect example of voyeurism (he falls in love with a woman he spies on) and of sadism (when he confronts Madeleine, he cross- examines her, trying to find the key to unlock her secret). As Wexman argues: “Scottie’s relationship with the law is not thereby severed but merely mystified, for his surveillance function merely shifts to a more personalized site: Madeleine’s body.”34 For Mulvey, as for Bellour, Scottie will finally unlock Madeleine’s secret and discover that she is nothing but a reflection of his own lack. Mulvey, however, emphasizes that if woman does not exist, then neither does man. She turns the cinematic gaze against itself, revealing only man’s investment in lack.

Mulvey set off a series of debates among feminists and psy- choanalytic film theorists about film’s role in representing sexual difference and its effect on female spectatorship. Teresa de Laure- tis calls Mulvey’s essay a “stoic, brutal prescription of self- discipline, the destruction of visual pleasure, that seemed inevitable at the time,” but she argues that feminism and film criticism need to con- struct a different social subject.35 What is at stake in these debates is the location of the subject. As Kofman put it, “men’s fascination with the eternal feminine is nothing but a fascination with their own double, and the feeling of uncanniness.”36 No longer stable, Scottie’s identity is contingent on his fascination with the woman- double and his position as subject is, therefore, no longer purely masculine. His identification with Madeleine blurs the distinction between Madeleine’s obsession/identification with the dead Car- lotta and Scottie’s obsession/identification with Madeleine. It is not clear here with whom he identifies: Madeleine the hysterical woman, or Carlotta the dead woman/mother. It is clear, however, that through identification with woman he can displace his vertigo, or his confrontation with his own impotence.

Yet, de Lauretis points out that Madeleine is not just a dou- ble but also a male construction of femininity — dressed up and rehearsed first by Elster and then by Scottie. Vertigo suggests that

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femininity is a matter of dress, a masquerade without essence, a copy of a copy created by man to seduce (trick) another man into being an accomplice to the murder of his wife. But this does not make Madeleine/Judy simply stand in for a fetishistic ideal, because otherwise Scottie could have projected his fantasy about Madeleine onto Midge rather than Judy. The construction of Madeleine as an image of celestial beauty does not need to be anchored in reality (Elster fashions Judy into a Madeleine only to seduce and dupe Scottie). This trick of switch and bait, however, is contingent on the actual (rather than just ideal) fit between Kim Novak’s appearance and socially established notions of beauty.

In her 1986 critique of how theories about Vertigo (both psychoanalytic and formalist) obfuscate the sociopolitical implica- tions of the film, Wexman questions the critics’ ideological invest- ments and class interests, arguing that Vertigo is first and foremost a commercial film. Hitchcock indulges the consumer’s impulses by reducing San Francisco to a series of disjointed tourist sites, and Novak to a manufactured romantic idol. She reads Vertigo as constructing and conflating gender, class, and racial differences. These three types of opposition come together to separate the men who represent “American imperialism characterized by the freedom and the power to colonize and plunder” from the women who instead epitomize the “object of exploitation, whether as the resources of an underdeveloped country or the body of an under- privileged woman.”37 Because it is not Madeleine but Carlotta who appears in Scottie’s dream- nightmare, Wexman sees Carlotta as the real enigma haunting the film. She is a deeply ambiguous figure associated with the Spanish mission, but also with caba- rets. It is not clear whether she is a descendant of old Spanish aristocracy or lower- class Latinos, or whether she is religious or promiscuous. Rather than clarify such ambiguities, Hitchcock associates her with both the upper- class, celestial Madeleine and the lower- class, tawdry Judy, resigning her to the “realm of exotic class marginality” (38).

The story of Carlotta may support Wexman’s argument about the race-, class-, and gender- based subjection of Carlotta to her unnamed white patrician lover, but this narrative of mastery

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cannot apply to either Elster, who must kill his wife for money and power, or Scottie, who is clearly no master of the gaze. As Philip Monk points out: “Madeleine Elster is subject to the look (however knowing her masquerade is, though) as Judy Barton is subject to being made over within it — to look like another (whose appear- ance, moreover, she has already mastered once). It seems that master is vexed and not so simple where woman may participate and command.”38 Yet even Monk is unsure whether Judy can be considered a femme fatale (possessing a commanding role over her own image) since he reads her as a cipher having “no role of her own, no subjectivity outside of men’s manipulations” (177).

Tania Modleski argues that instead of providing an all- masculine point of view, Scottie feminizes himself when he identi- fies with what he believes to be a female hysteric.39 Rather than secure Scottie’s identity as hero/victim/subject of the gaze, his attraction to Madeleine (which is not purely a desire to consume her as an object of pleasure but also to identify with her as his double) destabilizes Scottie’s position within the film. This femini- zation or destabilization of Scottie starts when, at the beginning of the film, we see him in Midge’s apartment complaining about hav- ing to wear a girdle. Modleski points out that because Scottie iden- tifies with Madeleine, all spectators identify with the woman as well. The film then expresses a critical female point of view connecting Scottie, who throws Judy’s love away, with Elster, who throws his wife off the tower and then ditches his girlfriend/accomplice. But these acts end up reconnecting Scottie and Elster to the nameless man who threw away Carlotta but kept their child.

Modleski also collapses this feminine critique (and with it, feminine subjectivity) into man’s desperate desire to “sustain a sense of himself that necessitates the end of woman” (100). She associates the figure of vertigo with Madeleine — the forward track- ing shots to the close- up of Carlotta’s and Madeleine’s hair twisted into a spiral — as “Scottie’s desire to merge with a woman who in some sense does not exist — a desire, then, that points to self- annihilation” (95). The figure and feeling of vertigo remain associ- ated with woman — her mystery, her absence — leaving us to believe that there is a resolution to Elster’s getting away with murder and

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with “ditching” Judy, as well as to Scottie’s getting away with his aggressive behavior toward Judy and with “ditching” her. But such a resolution — Scottie’s acceptance of his own death wish — would mean that woman is always dying in man’s place or to keep man in his place. Even if the final message is that “woman is only a symp- tom of man,” or that “woman does not exist,” such readings reduce sexual difference to gender binaries. What is at stake in all these readings is not just the subject’s (man’s) impossible (guilty) desire but also the status of the transcendental subject that is caught in its own indeterminacy.

Turning the Sadistic Gaze into a Transcendental Subject

In his Organs without Bodies (2004), Slavoj Žižek repeats the argu- ment that Vertigo is “the film about the captivating force of a sub- lime image,” adding that “Vertigo will assert itself as the film which directly stands for cinema as such.”40 He then proceeds to treat Vertigo as a traditional film noir wherein “Woman [Madeleine] is not an external, active cause which lures Man [Scottie] into Fall; she is just a consequence, a result, a materialization of Man’s Fall. So, when Man purifies his desire of the pathological remainders, Woman [ Judy] disintegrates in precisely the same way as a symp- tom dissolves after successful interpretation, after we have symbol- ized its repressed meaning.”41

The figure of vertigo in Madeleine’s hair. Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, US, 1958). Courtesy British Film Institute

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Žižek argues that Vertigo represents “a double loss” (the loss of loss) that exposes man to the radical nothingness of his desire. Scottie “is forced to accept that the lost object which transfixes his desire never existed in the first place,” that is, that Madeleine herself was a fake. His desire comes to represent “symbolic castra- tion” hidden in every “means of fetishizing the longing itself.”42 More important, Vertigo reveals the truth of desire, that is, that this nothing of negative subjectivity (desire) wants itself. It represents the confrontation of the universal subject with the reality of castra- tion — the object of desire is, as Žižek puts it, “a piece of shit.”43 It is lack itself that we must all come to identify with.

Žižek agrees with Mulvey that ultimately “nothing is the subject,” with de Lauretis that femininity is a masquerade, and with Modleski that Scottie is feminized and the feminine perspective is closer to the fragile reality (the void) than the masculine subject of the gaze. He does not, however, read the film in terms of actual gender politics, nor does he engage with what Modleski defines as an unmasterable femininity that is both the “unconsciousness of patriarchy” and the point of identification for all the film’s spec- tators.44 Instead he turns Vertigo into a metafilm — a film about film, about everyman’s imaginary, the sublime object of desire, the transcendental subject, and the “gaze of the real.”45 That gaze, however, is somehow dislodged from an actual spectatorship that might engage in the conventional power relations invested in the cinematic gaze, such as masculine propriety (Mulvey) and femi- nized masculinity (Modleski).

Borrowing from Wood, Žižek asserts that Vertigo is divided into three parts and a prologue, each of which corresponds to Mad- eleine/Judy’s suicidal leaps — the first into the bay, and the sec- ond two off the tower of the mission.46 He then proceeds to force these three main movements of the film to fit his definition of the “triad of the real”: “In part one, [Madeleine] is Phi, an imaginary presence at the site of the Real”; here Madeleine corresponds to the “imaginary Real,” the “mysterious je ne sais quoi ” or a “fragile pure appearance.” In part two, she is “the signifier of the barred Other (i.e., the signifier of a certain mystery)” and is “reduced to a senseless formula” of the “symbolic Real.” In part three, Judy “is

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the excremental abject- remainder.” As such, however, she cannot express what Žižek calls the “real Real” — “the horrifying Thing, the primordial object,” the “abyssal vortex that ruins every consis- tent structure.”47

Judy presents a rupture in Scottie’s (Elster’s) perceived (pro- jected) reality (fantasy) about women. She is neither the object- cause of Scottie’s desire (the stuff that dreams are made of ) nor is she the void (the traumatic- elusive Thing itself ). She is, instead, the “pathological stain,” the remainder of the Real that can have no perspective of her own. As such she is a liminal subject — the noth- ingness that sustains Scottie’s fantasy, and the victim that accepts her own self- negation. She is a subject only through her relin- quishing of herself to Scottie’s whims and desires, allowing Žižek to claim that only Scottie can perceive the gaze of the real. Even though all three parts of the film focus on the figure of Madeleine/ Judy, he claims that “all of these three figures are, of course, forms of defense against the central abyss threatening to swallow Scot- tie” (162). But the actual Judy does not quite fit into this model of male fantasies. She might not be the horrifying Thing itself, but she exposes the artificiality of male fantasies about love, thus undermining her role as Scottie’s defense mechanism.

By consigning Judy to the abject (excremental), she literally disappears into nonphallic surplus. Jean- Pierre Esquenazi coun- ters this argument in his analysis of the scene of the famous profile shot of Madeleine in Ernie’s Restaurant — the scene in which Judy and Scottie return to her dimly lit hotel room. Esquenazi describes the image of Judy as “exactly the negative (in the technical sense of the term) of the sublime profile.” Judy faces left rather than right, her face is somber, not luminous, and the background light is neon green rather than a warm red.48 He reads this negative image as one in the process of becoming, an image open to other possible readings, rather than Scottie’s obsessive attempt to restore it to the sublime image of Madeleine. There is a disjuncture here between how the audience sees this uncanny resemblance to the previous scene at Ernie’s and how Scottie sees it, or attempts to reconstruct it.

At the same time, these two chromatically opposing images —

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of Madeleine framed by a sea of warm red and Judy framed by sea green — demonstrate J. W. von Goethe’s rather erotic description of the afterimage, where the scarlet bodice of the “well- favoured girl” leaves a sea- green afterglow.49 It is precisely the same sea- green glow from which Judy reappears as Madeleine (when she emerges from the bathroom in the Empire Hotel). In this case, it would seem that it is the second image (the afterimage of Judy) that is more sublime than the first romantic image of Madeleine (framed in red). Furthermore, Scottie repeats Judy’s pose by sitting in the same chair, and like Judy he is shot in profile surrounded by the sea- green glow of the neon light. But how are we to read all these echoes and doublings? Do they amount to coherent resemblances or equivalences pointing to some central meaning (or meaning- lessness), or to a serial repetition that points instead to difference (variation and possibilities)?

Žižek instead reads this image as the common face of Judy, which he likens to “a proto- entity, an incomplete, formless slime, a kind of Platonic chora, a pure receptable [sic] for the sublime Idea of Madeleine.”50 This placing of woman as abject or not- all does not, as Elizabeth Grosz points out, “tell us what woman is, it is a device for revealing the masculine myths and phantasies invested in representing woman as all.” She continues: “Claiming this resid- ual jouissance of the woman — an ecstasy that man has (mis)taken for divinity — is beyond discourse and knowledge, ineffable, Lacan back- handedly repositions women in a dependent position. . . . Nothing more can be said than they are non- phallic.”51 And in fact Žižek argues that “the sublime object is precisely ‘an object elevated to the dignity of the Thing,’ an ordinary, everyday object that undergoes a kind of transubstantiation and starts to function, in the symbolic economy of the subject, as an embodiment of the impossible Thing, i.e. as materialized Nothingness.”52

Judy, “the common redhead,” is transformed into the sub- lime Madeleine. But as soon as Scottie realizes that Judy is the real substance of Madeleine, the ideal object dissolves, leaving what Žižek calls “the dross of the common object” (84). Accord- ingly, “Judy finally gives herself to Scottie, but — to paraphrase Lacan — this gift of her person ‘is changed inexplicably into a gift

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of shit’: she becomes a common woman, repulsive even” (86). It is just as plausible to argue that the actual Scottie, revealed in the last section of the film, is a “revolting gift of shit” — not for Judy who loves him although he no longer plays the romantic savior she fell in love with, but for the audience who identifies him as the romantic leading man, the everyman figure.

What makes Žižek’s analysis of Vertigo distinctive is his read- ing of the gaze not as an instrument of phallic mastery and control (Mulvey), but as an unmasterable, unknowable “real” that haunts the subject — a position that is not entirely distinct from Modleski’s. Against what he calls the “commonplaces of deconstructionist femi- nism” that link the gaze to power, Žižek claims that “the lessons of Hitchcock’s great masterpieces from Notorious [US, 1946] to Rear Window [US, 1954] . . . [show us] that the gaze does connote power, yet simultaneously, and at a more fundamental level, it connotes the very opposite of power — impotence — in so far as it involves the position of an immobilized witness.”53

Ironically, by privileging the gaze of the “immobilized wit- ness” over one that acts in the interest of an aggressively male- dominated perspective, Žižek turns this impotence of the power- less witness into a “possible experience of Sublime intense (sexual) enjoyment.”54 That is, instead of treating the gaze as an act of vio- lence sustained by the dominant ideological perspective, he argues that in reality this perspective (ideology) is an imposter. This “gaze of the real,” now defined as universal abjectness, becomes a virtual big other which has no trace of actuality. The master is always vir- tual: “It is a game run by the Big Other and the symbolic machine, the imposter is an imbecile who misperceives as the outcome of his decisions what actually ensues from the automatic run of the symbolic machine” (169). Rather than being left with misogynistic pleasure, identifying with the sadistic male gaze (Mulvey), we become the “Impotent Master.” In this shift, as Patricia Pisters points out, “Desire is still based on lack and absence, but now it has become a transcendental notion. . . . In short, the Lacanian subject, which according to Žižek is a Hitchcockian subject, is philosophically subjected to an a- historical transcendental principle that is always mediated by representations.”55

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Even so, theoretical maneuvers neglect the agency, rep- resentation, and the gaze of the criminal (Elster), of the victim (Madeleine), and of any other potential witnesses (Midge, Judy) other than that of the impotent master (Scottie). Criminality both undermines and replaces his authority, and symbolic authority is exchanged for pleasure. But the only pleasure mentioned by Žižek is that of the voyeur who (helplessly) watches (enjoys) mur- der and rape.

Beyond the Construction of a Perverse Imaginary

Both Wood and Esquenazi point out that the femme facile ( Judy) is no less an act than the femme fatale (Madeleine). Judy/Madeleine stages both characters for Scottie to seduce him into believing that she is someone else: first, that she is Madeleine (Elster’s wife) and then that she is Judy (not Madeleine). So how is it that we can distinguish the sublime or possessed Madeleine from the “tawdry” Judy when both are simulations of Hollywood stereotypes of class played out by the same actress? Similarly, Scottie’s nightmare that marks the presence of the abyssal Thing (the “real Real”) con- necting him to the “gaze of the real” is nothing but a simulation, a copy of a feigned dream that the Madeleine imposter claimed to have had.

Where is the “space of reality” concealed by such sem- blances? Vertigo is nothing but a film about endless dissimulations. Elster, a seemingly devoted yet murderous husband, rehearses and makes up the blonde, sublime, possessed (fake) Madeleine to look like his wife (but in the image of a Hollywood star) to dupe the seemingly hardheaded, rational Scottie (who then makes up another time the seemingly streetwise redheaded Judy), and finally Judy, who allows two men to project their obsessive fantasies on her and to make and remake her into something she is not. How can one tell if there is any truth to Vertigo when all these images are based on simulations of class differences (produced by hair dye, clothing, and office furnishings), of romantic love (simulated by music, fog filters, camera angles, and background settings), and of

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sublime objects of desire motivated by the nostalgia for a tyrannical vision of freedom and power but modeled on the image of dead women passed down from one man to another, from one genera- tion to another?

Rather than remaking the figure of Judy as an icon of seduc- tion by obsessively framing the female body, Douglas Gordon’s Fea- ture Film (UK, 2000), which is more of a supplementary film than a remake, presents James Conlon, the conductor of the Paris Opera, performing Herman’s score. As Monk claims, Gordon’s film “frees Judy Barton from man’s hold,” revealing underneath the look, a series of rivalries between men — between Hitchcock and Gordon as filmmakers, between Herman as composer and Conlon as con- ductor, between the musical score and Scottie’s emotional affect, between Elster and Scottie who vie to control Madeleine.56 But these are false rivalries, since without the snare of an enthralling image (Madeleine as simulacra or property), there is no longer any ground to fight over. Gordon exposes the repeated gesture of mastery in myopic detail, obsessively repeating only Vertigo’s claus- trophobic framing of the body — the close- ups of hands, eyes, ears, forearms, and the face of Conlon.

What disappears in Feature Film is the gendering of sound that divides Scottie’s emotional affect from Judy’s “siren sound” (178). In Feature Film we have only the connection of the hand of the master to the eye and the ear. But this repetition highlights the image of mastery and the controlling of mood that guides rather than reflects Scottie’s emotional response to Madeleine/ Judy. While vertigo may have visual effects, it is only a symptom of a disease of the inner ear, which, in this case, is manipulated by the hand of a series of masters (Hitchcock, Gordon, Herman, Conlon, Elster).57 By divorcing the sound of Vertigo from its image, Feature Film foregrounds deception and simulation. It is not a documentary of Conlon conducting the Paris Opera, but a film in which Conlon performs the role of the conductor. This is a performance of a performance that repeats the musical score of Vertigo in the film’s own real time. Feature Film draws attention to what Monk calls the truth of the lie.

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Feature Film’s supplementary commentary on Vertigo is com- plicated by Vertigo’s play of doubles: the hysterical man’s desire to identify (double or couple) with the woman who masquerades as the double for a ghost as a means to attract him returns in the form of endless repetition. This woman is impelled to reenact her masquerade of being a double so as to recuperate the love of a man obsessed with the past. Furthermore, the film’s repetition or dou- bling of men obsessed with power and freedom to control women amounts to turning them into an image — a pure appearance with- out any material reality. Even Scottie’s vertigo is not a real illness but an illness of perception (or the perception of illness) that masks the absence of a reality. Given the attention and effort that Vertigo puts into producing appearances, it is quite strange that so few psy- choanalytic readings of the film even notice the commodification of the image of male fantasies designed by men (Elster and Scot- tie) and manufactured by women (Madeleine/Judy, but also Midge who, after all, advertises brassieres) to seduce or please men.

As Wexman points out, critics do not seem to ask why the bourgeois woman is considered sublime but the working- class woman a “revolting gift of shit,” when in fact both Madeleine and Judy are played by the same actress.58 Nor do they seem to be inter- ested in the fact that Scottie is a policeman (a representative of the “repressive state apparatus” — a figure that Hitchcock deeply dis- trusted) and Elster a bourgeois capitalist (a member of the ruling class whose interests the police serve). As a member of the ruling class, Elster not only can throw women away but he can also get away with murdering his rich wife (who ironically provides him with both the means and the motive to do so). Along these lines, T. Jefferson Kline argues, “at no time does the seasoned detective Scottie Ferguson ever consider that the mastermind of the schema and appropriate focus of his anger is his old school chum, Elster. He focuses his (and our) entire hysterical energy on Madeleine’s betrayal. And true to his misogynist tendencies Hitchcock will make her pay.”59

Most readings of Vertigo hardly ever note that the involun- tary instrument for Scottie’s vengeance is a nun, which Judy fear- fully or guiltily mistakes for the ghost of Madeleine that literally

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scares her to her death. It is a nun that Judy spots emerging from the darkness that causes her to jump and fall to her death. This figure points to what Chabrol and Rohmer call Hitchcock’s deeply ingrained Catholicism.60 Commenting on Žižek’s reading of Vertigo, Pisters notes that he reads both the Hitchcockian and the Lacanian subject as “a guilty subject, always already guilty of wanting enjoy- ment, jouissance, which has its impossible origin in the Real. Here we see what Žižek means by Jansenism based on guilt and God.”61 While Žižek’s reading of the gaze of the real — which he also terms the “Gaze of God” — punishes man for his desires alone, there is no explanation for why Judy must pay for Scottie’s and Elster’s sins. Put in another way, what system of exchange equates the death of Judy with the impotence of Scottie?

“The story of Vertigo,” says Esquenazi, “makes Gavin Elster into an icon of men who run the film industry, in the production of stars the producer transforms a woman to dupe, abuse and kill.”62 Rather than confront the reality of cinema as an industry that com- modifies the images of both man and woman, readings of Vertigo tend to focus on effects of such commodification rather than its causes. This allows them to gloss over Vertigo’s own criticism of Hol- lywood’s production of male fantasies and male subjectivity, ignor- ing that from the very first scene, Scottie’s perception is presented as destabilized, if not damaged by vertigo. There are, in fact, a series of mysterious ellipses in the film, such as Scottie’s hanging from the roof in the first sequence only to end up in Midge’s apart- ment in the next, leaving out any representation of the probably long recovery period in the hospital.

Such ellipses leave open the possibility that the whole film is nothing but a product of Scottie’s imagination — while in a hospital ward, in a dream, or while hanging from the rooftop. Further- more, Scottie’s obsessions become consistently more violent and his perspective becomes increasingly less reliable as the narrative draws to a close. This is a frame narrative in which men escape justice, thus mirroring a biased perspective in which men have the power to throw women away. The man that Scottie is pursuing in the opening sequence gets away, but so do Elster and Scottie themselves. And in all cases an innocent (the cop, Madeleine, Judy)

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gets killed. Symmetrically, all female characters are literally thrown away: Carlotta (by the anonymous man), Madeleine (by Elster), Judy (by both Elster and Scottie), and Midge (by the film itself). This is a devastating critique of the effect of man’s (as both char- acter and filmmaker) desire not for love of but for power over and freedom from actual women.

Another element of a critique of male fantasies can be seen in Midge’s painting of herself in the place of Carlotta — a gesture that ridicules Scottie’s romantic fantasy about Madeleine. Scottie’s response to what he sees as Midge’s offensive painting demonstrates his inability to distinguish between different levels of time — the virtual past (Carlotta) and the actual present (the virtual Mad- eleine and the actual Judy). What Midge reveals here is that Scot- tie’s vertigo extends beyond his acrophobia into what Hitchcock termed his character’s “necrophilia.” We understand what it is “in” Judy that attracts Scottie (her likeness to the “dead” Madeleine), but it is not clear why he is attracted to Madeleine to begin with. Is it simply her simulation of the star image and her packaging of a fragile and unapproachable upper- class lady? Is it her likeness to the image of the dead Carlotta? Or is it her alleged obsession with death? In this context, Midge draws attention to what Scottie is unwilling to confront: that his desire and love are not authentic but merely a reaction compulsion to a carefully crafted advertising campaign. Being in the advertising business, she knows about the power of the image, which she deflates by replacing Carlotta with her own likeness.

The film is shot from a subjective point of view, but, by the end, its inconsistency puts subjectivity itself into crisis. There are moments of disruption of the cinematic gaze already in the first two movements of the film — in the free indirect subjective point of view that gazes at Madeleine at Ernie’s Restaurant and in Madeleine’s point of view just before she jumps into the San Francisco Bay. The disruption, however, becomes more radical in the last movement of the film, where Judy’s perspective is juxtaposed to Scottie’s and where Hitchcock more frequently deploys free indirect subjective point of view. Far from providing a more authoritative perspective,

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the free indirect subjective point of view undermines authority by exposing the cinematic power to manipulate what and how, as an audience, we get to see.

In the first part of the film the camera often mimics Scot- tie’s viewpoint — we watch Scottie watching Madeleine through the filter of a romantic vision. However, by the time he has a nightmare after the inquest into Madeleine’s death, Scottie becomes a victim of what we come to understand as a vision that is not his own — a vision constructed by someone else (Elster, Judy, Hitchcock, Holly- wood producers) for him (and us) to see. At this point the gaze is turned back at him, and Scottie’s madness slips over into the madness of the initial romantic vision itself. The more he attempts to reconstruct this vision, the more we see him and the vision as obsessive, controlling, and maniacal. The male hysteria over feel- ing out of control manifested in Scottie’s repetition compulsion is only further enhanced by the aggressively controlled framing of Madeleine/Judy, which transforms the uncanniness of repetition into a sense of claustrophobia. The obsessive gaze reveals that the masculine propriety of the gaze (Scottie’s and, by association, ours) is deeply installed in a social way of looking at romance and social agency promoted by 1950s Hollywood media. In the last movement of the film, Scottie attempts to overcome his feeling of helplessness by identifying not with Madeleine but with the institutional forms that disempower Judy. While the nun may stand in for the ghost of the actual Madeleine (or for the symbol of Judy’s guilt for her role in killing Madeleine or usurping Carlotta’s necklace), Scottie does indeed stand in Elster’s place.

This does not mean that Scottie is the same as Elster, just as Judy is not the same as Madeleine. Subjects and notions of self- hood break down in the film. For Pisters it is the exposure of the role of the spectator within the film — as “sometimes consciously addressed by the camera, sometimes presented with a point of view of one of the protagonists” — that unhinges the process of identi- fication, allowing the spectator to “wonder and wander on his or her own terms.”63 The tropes of wandering and wondering recall what Deleuze calls the “cinema of the seer,” where the protagonist

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becomes a spectator and, as such, cannot reconstruct the process of identification or pass judgment on events.64 The seer can only establish a network of relations that are constantly transforming, doubling, and redoubling like the initial image of vertigo appear- ing in Saul Bass’s opening titles, where the eye doubles for the image of vertigo. Yet this eye belongs to another woman, who is neither Madeleine/Judy nor Carlotta. It is not clear if this nameless woman stands in for woman as the figure of vertigo or for the film’s affect on the spectator (that is Scottie).

Repetition of the Same or Repetition as Difference

In Vertigo repetition does not function as a return of the same. Scottie does not murder Judy like Elster murdered Madeleine, though he may (this time) actually be responsible for her death. Even Judy, who is restored to the role of playing Madeleine, can no longer play the part of the rich woman possessed by the ghosts of the past. Ironically, it is Judy as Judy who is actually haunted by the ghosts of the past because she allows herself to be possessed by Scottie’s controlling the image of that past. By recalling the ghosts of previous events and their images in such iconic spaces — the place of Madeleine’s death, the site of Scottie’s traumatic inabil- ity to save the woman he loves, the crime scene — Vertigo draws together various perceptions of time, place, and conflicting mem- ories, but it does not resolve them. In the film, repetition functions more like the uncanny (a recurrent theme of what is unsettled and unsettling) than like a simple repetition compulsion (a symp- tomatic reaction induced by the return of repressed experiences).

It is the very repetition of events, images, and affective ges- tures that unsettles any sense of grounding. The famous scene in which Judy emerges from the bathroom bathed in a green filtered light as if she were indeed a phantasm signals various repetitions: the romantic aestheticism (the exaggerated use of fog filters fram- ing Madeleine in the first half of the film); Judy’s performance of Madeleine; the resurrection of the untimely quality of the film that confuses past, present, and future; and the delusion that the past

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doubles for the future. This single scene calls attention to itself as a purely cinematic image (produced through the use of fog filters), a self- conscious image (that Judy is aware she is stepping into char- acter), a hallucinatory image (that Judy is possessed by the ghost of Madeleine who is in turn possessed by the ghost of Carlotta), and as a simulation (an image with no origin).

The closing image of the film remains equally unsettled. Scottie assumes the very position of falling — of the policeman who fell to his death, of Madeleine/Judy falling off the bell tower, and of the dream image of himself falling into the void. This time, however, we do not see where he is falling, or what has fallen before him. We are not given his subjective point of view. This repetition of the gesture of falling challenges our understanding of closure: How can Scottie be cured when he repeats the very same gestures (signs) of vertigo? How can the repetition of the very image of fall- ing into not one continuous past but many discontinuous images of the past provide us with a conclusion to a film about vertigo? To suggest a closure would mean that we have to select one of the various images of vertigo as a point of departure. Yet if we select the image of the falling policeman, it does not resolve the vertigi-

Scottie embraces Judy as she emerges as Madeleine and is transported back to the Mission San Juan Bautista. Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, US, 1958). Courtesy British Film Institute

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nous twists in Madeleine’s hair, or the camera’s circling around the image of Judy and Scottie as they embrace, spiraling out from the Empire Hotel to the stables at the Mission San Juan Bautista. Vertigo blurs various forms of the past (the actual past, the imaginary past, nostalgia for the past, the performance of the past, the remains of the past, being haunted by the past) with various layers of the future (the potential death of Scottie or his potential cure, the potential remake of Madeleine as a love story or a melodrama, and the potential ending of the film).

Even if we were to assume that it was only Scottie who suf- fers from vertigo (rather than agree that the film itself produces a sense of vertigo), we must realize that his vertigo is never stable. That is, the figure of vertigo is not just a recurring nightmare of seeing the policeman fall to his death. Vertigo is translated and transformed by Scottie’s obsession with Madeleine and his mania- cal control over Judy. How are we then to assume that this vertigo, which has been spiraling out of control for the duration of the film, will suddenly end with the mise- en- scène? Does the film not also make us think about how we are drawn in, seduced, duped, enlightened, repelled, and perplexed?

The final return to the image of vertigo — the virtual or potential image of falling — suggests (as Scottie does at the end of the film) that it is “too late” to find a cure or give a sense of closure. Even if Scottie continually returns to the past, it will always be “too late,” as Marker suggests in La jetée (France, 1962) — a film he claimed to be a remake of Vertigo. Unlike Scottie, the protago- nist of La jetée is forced to return to the “portals of the past” in search of his actual or fantasized memory image of Madeleine. It is this image of Madeleine that allows him to survive time travel, where others have perished or been driven mad in the process of returning. Here she functions as a grounding device, not a mark of instability. But as he brings Madeleine to life or back to life through his memories, he realizes that she is already dead.

Time travel is briefly alluded to in Vertigo when Judy and Scottie are transported from the Empire Hotel to the stables at the Mission San Juan Bautista. Here the camera moves around the two

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characters. But it is not only the camera that moves; the background is also moving in the opposite direction, placing the two at the cen- ter of the spiral. As the camera rotates, we see the hotel room dis- solve into the stables at the mission. Scottie suddenly realizes that they have been transported, as it is he who turns to look over his shoulder, only to return to his embrace of Madeleine/Judy and the hotel room. Or, as Marker puts it, Scottie “discovers another set around him, that of the stable at the Dolores Mission where he last kissed Elster’s wife whose double he has now created.”65

What is so unsettling about this scene is that it simultane- ously visualizes vertigo by using the camera to circle around the characters and reveals Scottie’s realization that their embrace trans- ports them not to the eternal sea (where they first kiss) but to the site where Madeleine died. This is not a purely melancholic vision on the part of Scottie (a conjuring up or inhabiting of the past), since the stables are darker, seemingly shot at night rather than in the daylight as the earlier scene in the same location. This background image of the stables at night does not forewarn an ominous future to come because Judy and Scottie will not return to the stables. They are only seen to return to the church tower on the night of Judy’s death. This is, therefore, both an actual and a virtual image of a potential past and a potential future — or potentially another film. Similarly, in the scene of the spectacular embrace we only see the swirling image of vertigo that simultaneously spins inward around the characters and turns outward onto the virtual past or the virtual future, leaving us without any sense of grounding.

The endless spirals that wind through the film and the critical discourse generated by it produce a series of uncertainties, confronting all of those critical concepts that have been grounded on a particular reading of the film. The identification with Scottie is confronted with the fluidity of identifications with Madeleine, Elster, men with power and money, the spectator’s fascinated gaze, female sexuality, with life that wants nothing from us, and with death. There is a persistent temporal modulation between the vir- tual present, past, and future, and an indiscernability between the sensation of vertigo and an excess that collapses the status of the

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image as cipher (the object of fascination) and the image as sur- face (the simulation of beauty, seduction, and class). Rather than presenting historical rupture with narrative cinema (Deleuze) or the failure of narrative and cinematic fascination (Rancière), the spiral proves to be the rule. It ungrounds any linear or perspec- tivalist interpretation (vision) in favor of vertigo, where we all lose our bearings. The never- ending obsession with the film leaves us indecisive, vertiginous, and manipulative in trying to possess it through writing about it, like Scottie who tries, and fails, to possess Madeleine. It is not clear if we are left in the image of falling, as we let the film fall away from us as the figure of the remade Madeleine falls away from Scottie over the edge of the bell tower, which leaves us with a sense of failure — with failed desires (Žižek), the failure to ground the film on an image or idea (Deleuze), the failure of the fascinated gaze (Rancière) — or if we too have been caught in the act of falling away from all of these attempts to ground images, ideas, identities, and resemblances — falling into a spiral pathway made of bifurcations, breaks, and meanders.

Notes

Dedicated to the memory of John Orr. I thank Mario Biagioli, Tom Conley, John Orr, and Camera Obscura’s reviewers for all their wonderful comments and suggestions.

1. “For a film so revered,” Terrance Rafferty has argued, “Vertigo hasn’t been terribly influential.” Terrance Rafferty, “Fifty Years of Dizzy, Courtesy of Hitchcock,” New York Times, 11 May 2008. One might want to qualify this claim, as filmmakers like Chris Marker, Brian de Palma, Mike Figgis, Paul Verhoeven, David Lynch, Nicole Garcia, and Douglas Gordon have claimed to have been deeply influenced by Vertigo. For a more complete study of the influences of Vertigo and of Hitchcock’s films in general on international cinema, see John Orr’s Hitchcock and the Twentieth Century Cinema (London: Walflower Press, 2005).

2. Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, Hitchcock (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1957); William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Laura

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Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, no. 16 (1975): 6 – 18; Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Alfred Hitchcock in interviews with François Truffaut, French Radio Broadcast from 1962, “The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes,” tape no. 21, www.hitchcockwiki.com/wiki/Interview:_Alfred _Hitchcock_and_Francois_Tuffaut_%28Aug/1962%29 (note misspelling of Truffaut in URL, accessed 18 October 2010); Donald Spoto, Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979); Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (London: Plexus, 1988); Robin Wood, “Male Desire, Male Anxiety: The Essential Hitchcock,” in A Hitchcock Reader, ed. Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1986), 219 – 30, reprinted in Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 371 – 87; Chris Marker, “Free Play: Notes on Vertigo,” www.chrismarker.org/a- free- replay- notes- on- vertigo (accessed May 2008); Jean- Pierre Esquenazi, Hitchcock et l’aventure de Vertigo: L’invention à Hollywood (Hitchcock and The Adventure of Vertigo: As Hollywood Invention) (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2001); Dan Auiler, Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Jeff Kraft and Aaron Leventhal, Footsteps in the Fog: Alfred Hitchcock’s San Francisco (Santa Monica, CA: Santa Monica Press, 2002). There has been a tour of the sites shot in Vertigo that has attracted visitors for several years (www .toursanfranciscobay.com/tours/hitchcocks-vertigo.html), which is distinct from the pilgrimage that Lynda Myles and Michael Goodwin wrote about in San Francisco Magazine in 1982 (see Charles Barr, Vertigo [London: British Film Institute, 2002], 11 – 12), in which individuals would set their own course.

3. Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988); Slavoj Žižek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan: (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (London: Verso, 1992); Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1997), 195 – 96; Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and

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Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Jacques Rancière, “Negation and Cinematic Vertigo,” a talk at the European Graduate School, August 2009, www.egs.edu; Orr, Hitchcock and the Twentieth Century Cinema.

4. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 62 – 63.

5. For a more in- depth critique of the feminist literature on Vertigo, see Virginia Wright Wexman, “The Critic as Consumer: A Film Study in the University, Vertigo, and the Film Canon,” Film Quarterly 39, no. 3 (1986): 32 – 41; and Susan White, “Allegory and Referentiality: Vertigo and Feminist Criticism,” in “Comparative Literature,” special issue, MLN 106 (1991): 910 – 32; Robert Samuels, Hitchcock’s Bi- textuality: Lacan, Feminisms, and Queer Theory (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998).

6. Patricia Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

7. I am referring to the following films that directly invoke Vertigo as a reference: Douglas Gordon’s Feature Film (UK, 2000), Chris Marker’s La jetée (France, 1962), and Jean- Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma (France, 1988 – 98).

8. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), xii.

9. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 17 – 21.

10. Alfred Hitchcock in a 1964 interview, first aired on the BBC program Monitor, uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ydvU64L758c (accessed 15 May 2008).

11. See Peter Bogdanovich’s 1963 interview with Alfred Hitchcock on www.moma.org/exhibitions/1999/hitchcock/interview/ interview_9.html (accessed 5 May 2008).

12. Chabrol and Rohmer, Hitchcock, 76 – 78; Deleuze, Cinema 1, 200 – 205.

13. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (London: Routledge, 1954); Deleuze, Cinema 1, 203.

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14. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 201 – 3.

15. Kofman, The Enigma of Woman; Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much; Samuels, Hitchcock’s Bi- textuality; William Rothman, “Vertigo: The Unknown Woman in Hitchcock,” in Images in Our Souls: Cavell, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 64 – 81.

16. Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” 1969, trans. Kari Hanet, Screen, 18, no. 4 (1977): 35 – 47. Although it is Oudart who coins the phrase the absent One, it is Daniel Dayan in “The Tudor- Code of Classical Cinema,” Film Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1974): 22 – 31, who presents a more radical, structural reading of this position as one that is not necessarily connected to a subjective point of view.

17. Tom Cohen, War Machines, vol. 2 of Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 311 – 12.

18. Rothman, Hitchcock, 42.

19. Barr, Vertigo, 36 – 40; James Maxfield, “A Dreamer and His Dream: Another Way of Looking at Hitchcok’s Vertigo,” Film Criticism 14, no. 3 (1961): 5; Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, 112 – 15; Marker, “Free Play.”

20. Jean Douchet, “Hitch et son public” (“Hitch and His Public”), Cahiers du cinéma, no. 113 (1960): 7 – 15.

21. Jacques Rancière calls this the moment of reversal that transforms the gaze of the detective into the fascinated gaze. Rancière, “Negation and Cinematic Vertigo.”

22. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 19 – 25, 47 – 49.

23. Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films (New York: A. S. Barnes and Tantivy, 1966).

24. See Marc Augé, Non- Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2009), 85. Douglas Cunningham, “ ‘It’s All There, It’s No Dream’: Vertigo and the Redemptive Pleasures of the Cinephilic Pilgrimage,” Screen 49 (2008): 123 – 41. Cunningham defines the tour

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of Vertigo/San Francisco as “a pilgrimage . . . a journey to a revered place, but its ultimate destination is an intangible, spiritual one. The well- trodden landmarks and geographies . . . serve merely as springboards for a potentially much larger phenomenological — even spiritual — experience.”

25. Rancière, “Negation and Cinematic Vertigo.”

26. Wexman, “The Critic as Consumer,” 37.

27. Wood, Hitchcock’s Films, 129.

28. Raymond Bellour, “Le blocage symbolique” (“Symbolic Blockage”), Communications, no. 23 (1975): 235 – 350.

29. White, “Allegory and Referentiality,” 925.

30. Janet Harbord, Chris Marker: La Jetée (London: Afterall Books, 2008), 43.

31. Although Harbord is referring to Chris Marker’s La jetée, I see this appeal of the actress and the act of looking at the other in a moment of privacy to apply to Vertigo.

32. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 4, 69 – 72.

33. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 6 – 18.

34. Wexman, “The Critic as Consumer,” 40.

35. De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, 155.

36. Kofman, Enigma of Woman, 56.

37. Wexman, “The Critic as Consumer,” 38. “In Vertigo, Kim Novak’s position as a manufactured romantic idol is a crucial component of the film’s power. It has often been noted that the story of an ordinary young woman who is transformed into a celestial beauty by a controlling man recreates the director’s relationships with his female stars, many of whom were also transformed into erotic ideals under Hitchcock’s own tutelage” (33). See also Fredric Jameson’s “Reading Hitchcock,” October 23 (1982): 15 – 42, where he argues that San Francisco is reduced to a picture postcard, devoid of any experiential notion of San Francisco (21).

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38. Philip Monk, Double- Cross: The Hollywood Films of Douglas Gordon (York, UK: York University Press, 2003), 164. Monk does not argue that Scottie is feminized but that the film is about the male loss of mastery.

39. Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, 87 – 93.

40. Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004), 150 – 51, is designed as a critical “encounter” with Deleuze. In fact, Žižek uses Deleuze’s treatment of Hitchcock to read and reread films psychoanalytically.

41. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 187.

42. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 195 – 96.

43. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 2005), 168.

44. Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, 1 – 17.

45. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 214; and Žižek, Organs without Bodies, 163.

46. See Wood, Hitchcock’s Films, 78, where Wood argues that Vertigo “can be seen to fall conveniently into a brief prologue and three main acts or movements. The prologue gives us the incident that precipitates Scottie’s vertigo, the first movement his consent to watch Madeleine, his following her, the gradual deepening of his involvement; the second takes us from her attempted suicide and their meeting, through their developing relationship to her death and his breakdown; the third begins with his meeting with Judy, and passes through the development of their relationship, his attempted re- creation of Madeleine, to Judy’s death and the curing of Scottie’s vertigo.”

47. Žižek, Organs without Bodies, 102 – 3, 162.

48. Esquenazi, Hitchcock et l’aventure de Vertigo, 184. The text reads: “L’image de Judy est exactement l’image negative (au sens technique du terme) du profil sublime offert chez Ernie. Le profil montré est le gauche et non plus le droit; il est sombre et non plus lumineux; et il se détache sur une ambiance verte et non plus rouge. Et cette fois, Scottie est devant l’image à la fois semblable à et inverse de celle à laquelle il tournait le dos, et

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que pourtant il <<visionna>>. Ce négatif peut s’entendre comme une image non encore développée, une image en devenir: il faut encore que Scottie agisse sur elle pour qu’elle devienne l’image totale, le profil merveilleux, sublime et captif.” (“The image of Judy is exactly the negative (in the technical sense of the term) of the sublime profile of Madeleine we are given [at Ernie’s Restaurant]. The profile is shot from the left instead of the right; it is somber and no longer luminous; and it is set against a green background instead of the bright red one [at Ernie’s]. And this time, Scottie stands in front of the image [of Judy] that is at the same time comparable to [the sublime Madeleine] and inverse of that which he [has previously] turned his back to, and therefore, he has ‘envisioned.’ The negative could be understood as an image not yet developed, an image in the process of becoming: Scottie still has to act on the image to make it a total image, the marvelous profile, sublime and captivating.”)

49. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, 1810, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 22.

50. Žižek, Organs without Bodies, 161.

51. Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1990), 138 – 39.

52. Žižek, Looking Awry, 83.

53. Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 73.

54. Žižek argues that “the ‘powerless witness’ is also a crucial component of the experience of the Sublime: this experience takes place when we find ourselves in the face of some horrifying event whose comprehension exceeds our capacity of representation; it is so overwhelming that we can do nothing but stare at it in horror; yet at the same time this event does not pose immediate threat to our physical well- being, so that we can maintain the safe distance of an observer. Kant confines the experience of the Sublime to examples from nature, bypassing the fact that a human act can also trigger an experience; the act of torture and murder — here also we are in a state of horror” (Žižek, Metastases, 74). Here he seems to suggest that trauma functions like the sublime. Yet he does not divorce the sublime from the beautiful, but attempts to reconcile bearing witness to atrocities with aesthetic pleasure.

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55. Patricia Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture, 19.

56. Monk, Double- Cross, 166 – 79.

57. Vertigo is not usually associated with acrophobia, but with the vestibular system, located in and around the ear. This is the part of the inner ear that is responsible for integrating what we see, hear, and feel with head and body movement. Vertigo is itself a symptom that usually manifests itself as the spinning of the world around the individual or the individual spinning in the world.

58. Wexman, “The Critic as Consumer,” 35 – 37.

59. T. Jefferson Kline, “Recuperating Hitchcock’s Doubles: Experiencing Vertigo in Garcia’s Place Vendôme,” Studies in French Cinema 3 (2003): 39.

60. Chabrol and Rohmer, Hitchcock, 117.

61. Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture, 19.

62. Esquenazi, Hitchcock et l’aventure de Vertigo, 180. The original reads: “La narration de Vertigo fait de Gavin Elster une icône de toute l’industrie du cinema productrice de stars: l’homme qui transforme une femme pour duper, abuse, et tuer.”

63. Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture, 37.

64. See Deleuze, Cinema 1, chap. 12; and Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time- Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), chap. 1. Even though Vertigo, Rear Window, and The Birds (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, US, 1963) hold such a pivotal role in Deleuze’s theory of the transition from the movement image to the time- image, he has very little to say about these films in particular.

65. Marker, “Free Play.”

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Kriss Ravetto- Biagioli is a senior lecturer in film studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (University of Minnesota Press, 2001) and has published articles on digital and performance art, modernism, feminism, nationalism, representations of violence, and postsocialist cinema. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled “Mythopoetic Cinema at the Margins of Europe.”

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Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, US, 1958). Courtesy British Film Institute

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